The Self Help Antidote

Send us Fan Mail

What if being resilient means more than getting better at enduring difficult things?

When life becomes unpredictable, we’re often told to stay strong, adapt, and keep going. But what happens when the people holding everything together need support themselves?

In this episode, I share lessons from my conversation with former prisoner of war Captain Charlie Plumb, Including an unexpected encounter with the sailor who packed his parachute, to explore four foundations of resilience: control, connection, challenge, and commitment.

We explore how to recognize where your actions still matter, build relationships that offer belonging and support, find opportunities to grow without denying the difficulty, and stay connected to what gives your life meaning.

You can’t control every storm. But you can adjust your sails, strengthen your crew, and stay connected to a direction worth travelling.

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com

Send us Fan Mail

Being busy is one thing. Knowing whether your effort is creating something valuable is quite another.

In this episode, Craig Harper and I explore the difference between activity and progress, and when an over structured plan can get in the way of learning. We unpack a surprising lessons I learned from my personal training days: the more I charged, the fewer objections I received. What does that reveal about perceived value, trust, and the associations people attach to price?

From branding and storytelling to using coaching skills in sales, we discuss why value is defined by the person you serve. It starts with understanding the problem, how much it hurts, and what leaving it unresolved is costing them. Sometimes, the difference lies not just in the problem you solve, but in how you solve it.

A conversation about staying curious, asking better questions, and becoming obsessed with learning.

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com

Send us Fan Mail

What if kindness at work isn’t the opposite of accountability, but one of the conditions that makes accountability possible?

In this episode, we explore the science behind kindness, connection, psychological safety, trust, compassion, curiosity, and human performance. We look at why seemingly small behaviors, listening a little longer, asking a better question, acknowledging someone’s contribution, or responding to difficulty with dignity, can have effects far beyond the moment itself.

We also make an important distinction between being nice and being kind. Kindness doesn’t require avoiding discomfort, lowering standards, or agreeing with everyone. Sometimes kindness means listening. Sometimes it means challenging someone, setting a boundary, having the difficult conversation, or telling the truth without weaponizing it.

Because high performance isn’t created by pretending people stop being human when they arrive at work. It’s created, in part, by building environments where people can speak honestly, contribute fully, recover from difficulty, learn, and grow.

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, I sit down with Jo Groves to revisit one of the most unconventional commencement speeches of the last decade: Tim Minchin’s 2013 address at the University of Western Australia.

Minchin offered nine life lessons that are funny, provocative, and occasionally counterintuitive: you don’t have to have a dream, don’t make happiness your goal, remember how much of life is luck, exercise, be hard on your opinions, be a teacher, define yourself by what you love, respect people with less power than you, and don’t rush.

Jo and I unpack each of these ideas and explore why they still resonate more than a decade later. Along the way, we talk about ambition, uncertainty, humility, health, curiosity, power, purpose, and the strange pressure we place on ourselves to have life figured out.

It’s a conversation about taking life seriously without taking yourself quite so seriously, questioning some of the advice we’re usually given, and perhaps discovering that a meaningful life doesn’t require a perfect plan.

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com

Send us Fan Mail

Over the years, I've had the privilege of working with and learning from some extraordinary leaders and mentors. 

What stayed with me wasn't their charisma or ability to command a room.  It was how they treated people, made decisions, built trust, responded to adversity, and most of all, developed others.  

In this episode I share some of the leadership lessons that have stayed with me throughout every stage of leadership in my own learning and development.  

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com

Send us Fan Mail

What if becoming more fully yourself has less to do with looking inward forever, and more to do with what you choose to give your attention, and energy to next?

In this episode, in my discussion with Craig Harper and Tiffanee Cook we explore the relationship between self-regulation, agency, identity, meaning, and generosity. We look at the difference between an internal and external locus of control, the stories we tell ourselves that can intensify our suffering, and why painful experiences often reveal what we value most.

We also examine a frustrating truth: knowing better and doing better are not the same thing. Real change happens when insight becomes behavior. You begin to become the person you want to be by practicing the things that person would actually do, often through changes so small they seem almost insignificant at first.

Because once the door is open even slightly, it becomes much easier to push it wider.

Ultimately, this conversation moves beyond self-improvement and toward something larger: the meaning and power that can emerge when your story stops being entirely about you and begins to include what you can contribute to other people.

Perhaps originality is not simply about becoming different.

Perhaps it is about becoming more deliberately yourself, and then using that self both intentionally as well as generously.

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com

Send us Fan Mail

Empathy is one of the most important ingredients in effective coaching and communication. Approaches such as Motivational Interviewing demonstrate that people are more likely to explore change when they feel genuinely heard, understood, and accepted rather than judged, corrected, or managed.

But empathy has a potential downside.

In this episode, we explore why empathy is a non-negotiable for great coaching and leadership, but also what can happen when we become so emotionally absorbed in another person’s experience that empathy turns into empathic distress. Research suggests that when we become overwhelmed by someone else’s emotions, our attention can shift away from their needs and toward managing our own discomfort, reducing our capacity for curiosity, presence, perspective, and compassionate action.

We examine the critical distinction between understanding someone’s experience and becoming consumed by it, and why effective coaches and leaders need to remain deeply connected without losing the psychological space required to think clearly, ask better questions, and help others move forward.

The goal isn’t less empathy, or maintaining a degree of attachment; that's destructive to the process of coaching.  Rather, It’s empathy with enough presence, perspective, and emotional regulation to turn understanding into compassion and effective action.

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com

Send us Fan Mail

What if work-life balance isn’t really about balance at all?

In this episode, we challenge the familiar idea that a well-lived life means somehow becoming equally successful at work, relationships, health and everything else, while remaining calm, well-rested and mysteriously caught up on email.

Instead, we explore a different question:

How do we create enough space for the things that actually matter?

We’ll look at why greater efficiency often creates more work rather than more freedom, why every yes contains a hidden no, and how meaningful work can enrich your life without being allowed to consume it.

We’ll also challenge two opposite assumptions: that burnout is simply an individual time-management problem, and that caring deeply about your work is inherently unhealthy. The healthier alternative may be engagement without enmeshment, where work can provide purpose, challenge and meaning without becoming your entire identity.

Finally, we introduce the SPACE framework:

See the trade-offs
Prioritize what matters
Audit the system
Create boundaries
Engage in life beyond work

Because perhaps the goal isn’t to balance work against life.

It’s to deliberately allocate your finite attention, energy and time among the things that make a life worth living.

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com

Send us Fan Mail

What if the way you talk to yourself is progressively making burnout worse?

We’re often told that changing our lives starts with changing our thoughts. Think positively. Repeat affirmations. Tell yourself, “I will do this.” But when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, and running on fumes, your brain may have a fairly compelling rebuttal.

In this episode, we explore the relationship between beliefs, self-talk, motivation, and burnout, including fascinating research from psychologists Ibrahim Senay, Dolores Albarracín, and Kenji Noguchi suggesting that asking yourself a question such as “Will I?” may sometimes be more motivating than simply declaring “I will.”

Why? Because questions can restore something burnout often strips away: a sense of agency.

Rather than turning recovery into another list of things you’re failing to do properly, we’ll look at how open, specific, near-term questions can help you identify choices, reconnect with your own reasons for acting, and turn enormous goals into manageable next steps.

We’ll also explore why some affirmations backfire, how unrealistic self-talk can erode self-trust, and why lasting change is built less through heroic declarations and more through small commitments you actually keep.

Because resilience isn’t something you become by announcing it.

You build it.

One choice, one conversation, one boundary, one exercise session, and one kept promise at a time.

The question isn’t whether you can completely transform your life today.

A better question might be:

What is the best I genuinely have available today, and what can I do with it?

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com

Send us Fan Mail

This week, Jo Groves and I sit down with former television video producer and content creation expert Richard Playfair to ask a mildly uncomfortable question:

Are you creating content, or simply consuming so much of it that your brain has become an AirBnB for other people's ideas?  

We explore why social media leaves intelligent, capable people feeling overwhelmed. 

Richard takes us through the evolution of content creation, the biochemistry of engagement, and my obsession with Ikigai, bliss, purpose, and finding the one sacred calling that will make every Monday morning feel significant. Perhaps Meaning isn’t always hiding on a mountaintop. Sometimes it’s sitting quietly inside the ordinary life we keep scrolling past.

The first question you need to ask before unleashing your passion, talent, and message upon an already exhausted internet:

Who is this actually for?

We discuss the courage to create before you feel ready, why nobody is thinking about you nearly as much as your anxiety suggests, and the difference between speaking from authority and contributing something genuinely useful.

We discuss “YAP content,” showing up authentically, along with the skateboard model: build the minimum viable version, put it into the world, learn what breaks, and improve it. 

We also explore how to turn content into assets, organize ideas into programs and deliverables, understand the intent-focused buyer, and why you still need a website rather than constructing your entire professional identity on rented social-media land.

This is a conversation about content creation without the usual performance, posturing, or promises that six reels and a hook template will transform you into the next media empire.

Start small. Make something useful. Be brave enough to be seen learning.

Everyone else is figuring it out too.

Visit us at:

www.theselfhelpantidote.com